70 Scientific American, March 2021JASON QUINLAN (1, 3,4 ); MICHAEL ASHLEY (2 )knives to soup bowls. And now, thanks to a
high-tech analysis of their stew pots, we
know what they ate.
“It was like a crime story,” says archae-
ologist Eva Rosenstock with a laugh, as she
describes how she and her colleague Jessi-
ca Hendy used forensics methods to extract
telltale molecules from ancient food stuck
to the inside of cooking vessels. Rosenstock
is a research associate at the Einstein Cen-
ter Chronoi in Berlin, and she has been
studying foods and health during the Neo-
lithic for most of her career. She met Hen-
dy a few years ago at a conference, where
Hendy was explaining how she had figured
out what people ate in the Middle Ages by
examining calcium deposits on their tooth
enamel. Trapped inside that calcium were
traces of lipids and proteins, chemicals
found in all living things—including the
ones we eat. Hendy could identify medieval
foods by cross-referencing the molecular
structures of the lipids and proteins on people’s dirty teeth with
those from known animals and plants.
It was a moment of inspiration for Rosenstock. She had ex-
amined a few clay bowl fragments from Çatalhöyük that had a
thin calcite layer on the inside, “kind of like limescale in teapots,”
she explained. She convinced Hendy to examine those ancient
dishes for molecules that would reveal Neolithic menu items.
There was a nail-biting period when Hendy started the anal-
ysis and her first matches were with exotic aquarium fish and lo-
tus flowers—the result of contamination of the sample with mod-
ern molecules. Luckily, further analysis showed that there were
much closer molecular matches to other edibles—and these were
the real deal. Rosenstock, Hendy and their colleagues discovered
traces of peas, wheat, barley, goat, sheep, cattle and even some
deer. But the most interesting discovery by far was that all the
bowls had held milk at a time before most humans evolved the
genetic mutation that allows us to metabolize milk products as
adults. Indeed, the dairy remains at Çatalhöyük are among the
oldest ever recovered. This does not mean Çatalhöyük diners
were getting sick in the way lactose-in tolerant people do now.
Recent research shows that our gut microbiome—all the micro-
organisms that live in our intestines—can help us digest milk.
The researchers had simply gotten a rare glimpse of the moment
when adults began to cook with milk. Over the next several thou-
sand years the mutation that helps people digest dairy into adult-
hood spread throughout Europe and the Middle East.
Rosenstock believes these milk residues also reveal an ancient
laborsaving strategy. Back in the Neolithic, dairy would have been
seasonal. Animals gave birth in the spring, and their milk would
have dried up by winter. To enjoy milk year-round, communities
all across the world invented cheese and other fermented dairy
foods that could keep for a long time. In Turkey and nearby re-
gions, people prepare a dried sour milk dish known variously as
qurut or kashk. Sometimes it is molded into balls and sometimes
powdered; for added flavor, the milk can be fermented with
ground grains, too. People at Çatalhöyük might have been mak-
ing a similar dish. “You get this super storable thing that won’t
go rancid for years,” Rosenstock says. “You put it in hot water, andHOME was not only where people slept but also where they worshipped and worked.
Skeletons found buried under the floors attest to the spiritual aspect of home ( 1 ).
Clay balls ( 2 ) may have helped heat food or keep people warm. Clay pots ( 3 ) and
obsidian knives ( 4 ) evince food preparation.1 23 43-6-1-6-6-7-5-1-3